Therefore, while what I’m about to tell you may not sound all that exciting to you, keep the photo above in mind when I say I feel like my lunch breaks this week should have made the national news. Or at least the local news. Okay, maybe my relative sense of severity is off but what do you expect? I’m at the point where I’m making up star-crossed love stories of pretzel heir/esses. Give me a break.

My boss is out of town, and my night classes start next week (and with them starts no hope of my going to the gym after work) so I decided to test out whether I could get to the downtown YMCA branch (which I had never been to) for a pilates class at noon and back to my office within an hour.

So I Google mapped my directions out; it would take 6 minutes to get there.

Turns out “there”, which Google maps told me was the Y, was a homeless shelter. I figured this out as I got out of the car with my bright green, flowery yoga mat and noticed lots of… dirty people standing around outside.

I couldn’t bring myself to believe that Google Maps had failed me — was I going to have to start using MapQuest?? — so I decided that the logical reason for all of these homeless people was that the YMCA must be next to the YWCA, which I knew had a shelter of some kind. So my increasingly lame yoga mat and I went inside.

Yeah, it was a homeless shelter. Just a plain old, non-YMCA affiliated homeless shelter.

NOT A GYM.

The lady that worked there gave me directions to the actual Y. I got lost and confused because there were movie trucks lining most of the streets I needed to turn down – Butter (whose movie set Yoni and I happened to stumble upon once), was filming somewhere downtown. When I finally got to my pilates class, 20 minutes late for a 45 minute class, I discovered where exactly the movie was filming: in the pilates workout room.

The movie crew had infested the gym, and I tiptoed around them, thinking I might see someone famous. Nope. Just a lot of racks of clothing you might see at a butter carving contest.

While looking around, I noticed what an interesting old building I was in. I was sort of teetering on whether I thought it had a lot of character or was just plain creepy. When I asked one of the guys who worked there to show me where the pilates classes had been relocated to, he took me up some really narrow stairs to a platform above the building.

And as he started to lead me up the next flight of stairs, I had to ask him if he was kidnapping me.

By the way, I decided on “just plain creepy”.

On my way to the locker room after my workout, I passed a bank of directors’ chairs where Kristen Schaal was sitting. You might know her from The Daily Show, Flight of the Conchords, or Modern Family, as poor Manny’s date that didn’t quite work out.

My celebrity sighting fix satiated, I felt like I was ready to end my adventures and go back to The Office. As I was changing clothes, a woman (who was dressed for a county fair, not a workout) came in and checked her lipstick. She looked incredibly familiar… like an aunt, or the wife of my refrigerator supplier. Then it clicked.

Yep, I had just been staring open mouthed, with no shirt on, at Phyllis from The Office.

Well, it’s official. Y and I have run out of things to talk about. Since he’s been studying for his boards, we both spend our days locked in closet sized rooms with no windows. He could tell me about why practice question X was unfair or too hard, but I try to discourage that since I don’t speak medicalese. And I could tell him how many times we change one little sentence in something we’re editing at work, but well, that’s boring.

So when we meet for lunch outside of the med school where I work and he studies, the conversation is pretty much nonexistent. The other day I was checking my Nalgene bottle for leaks while he was reading the back of his bag of pretzels. “Snyders of Hanover,” he read, “Not to be confused with Snyders of Berlin. I wonder why they need to put that on the bag.” I shrugged. “Probably some tragic, pretzel-based Romeo and Juliet.” We spent the next 15 minutes discussing theories of why Snyders of Hanover didn’t want to be associated with Snyders of Berlin. And then we went back to our caves.

All in all, a successful lunch break. Join us next time as we debate whether PBJs should be cut into rectangles or triangles (triangles).

The other day, after I had cleaned out our refrigerator, Yoni informed me that I had put the yogurt in the wrong place: in the door shelf. You should probably put it towards the back of the refrigerator where it’s colder. How sweet, right? He was making sure our yogurt didn’t go bad and we didn’t get sick. The perfect, neurotic husband.

The next time I looked in the refrigerator, Yoni had moved all of his yogurts to the back of the fridge…

I said this a few blogs ago: I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.

Well, it turns out I never did. When I was growing up, I swore I wanted to be a vet until I realized that being a vet requires science. Science and I don’t really get along.

In high school, we had to keep a journal and answer questions asked by the teacher each day. One of those was the dreaded “what do you want to be” question. I wrote, “An MTV VJ so I can meet lots of celebrities.” Since we were — for some reason — graded on our innermost thoughts, when I got my journal back, “Shallow goal” was scrawled in red ink.

Luckily, the rest of my career path changes were documented:

2/18/02I really want to be on the real world. While most people would hate this, I would love to be followed around by cameras and have my life and relationships analyzed. I wouldn’t worry about not being interesting, because they throw things at you to make it interesting. Think of the amazing bonds you would have with your roommates. That’s something you definitely couldn’t get anywhere else. Plus, the houses are always amazing. I love watching the first episode where everyone gets to the house and is like speechless at the rooms and the furniture and stuff.

5/4/03I met a girl who works at the sonic by my house and she got like a whole bunch of money(i cant remember if it was 80 or 50 dollars) in tips. i want to work at sonic!!!!!!!

5/28/03today i went to the mall and applied to some places. i want to work at adopt a bear!!! actually id really like to work at smoothie king or american eagle!!

[Those entries were apparently B.SATC… before Sex and the City.]7/26/03one day i will walk(in my manolo blahniks) down busy streets to work. then at night, ill sip martinis out of posh glasses…still wearing my manolo blahniks.

3/13/04and last but not least, ive decided that when i grow up im gonna be like carrie and write a column for a newspaper. except i dont want to go through all those journalism classes. i dont want to interview people, and all that jazz, i just want to write about my life. and turn all my little adventures into deeper, column worthy stories. just like carrie.

4/5/04 i’m officially quitting school and becoming a maid. for the past three hours ive been cleaning my bathroom, and i dont meant just cleaning it, i mean HANDS AND KNEES using a toothbrush and bleach to scrub the stuff between the tiles. what’s that stuff called? is it grommet? i think i heard that, but then isn’t that what the holes that you put shoelaces through are called? i think thats just the universal name for anything you don’t really know the name of. oh ps im cleaning the bathroom at my house, not my apartment, just so you know which grommits to compliment!

[Pretty sure I meant “grout”]

4/22/04

ive decided to drop out of school again and become a juice taster. how amazing would that be?! [Really? “amazing?”] maybe ill open my own juice/smoothie store. i have this whole dream ahead of me… right now im drinking cranberry raspberry fuze- just for the record, its ok, it kind of makes your mouth feel slippery and sticky at the same time.

5/4/04 i’m going to drop out of college and go to beauty school! after i went to the hair school to get my bangs cut for cheap, i decided i wanted to be a hairstylist, then i scratched that and found my true calling as a chef – i think i could make breakfast in bed all day for the rest of my life , and as of last night im joining the pussycat dolls. what are they? i mean it cant be that hard, they don’t even dance in synch. if that doesn’t work out, i can make a living designing and selling picture frames!

2/28/05 so i have a plan- after i graduate, (since ill never get a job) ill apply for ten thousand internships in new york, chicago, and dallas. then ill move to dallas for a year, live in a studio apartment, work at jamba juice by night, and be the little bitch to an advertising agency by day- hit the gym on my lunch break and order take out sushi every night. this will be the first half of my life, and at the end ill make a cheesy soundtrack for my life, seduce matthew mcoughnaghy in my sweet bachelorette pad and call it a romantic comedy. and when i get bored of being a corporate career woman, ill go down the desperate housewife road, check out a few gardeners, you know how it goes.

In 2007 I was quoted in a local magazine:Health care communications is drawing more women. Recent [journalism school] graduate Daci 23, spent the last year working in public relations at [ad agency], but she will pursue a graduate degree in public health this fall to balance her PR background. “I’ve become passionate about health, and I want to find ways to get the message out about healthy behavior,” she says.

Let’s be real. I was obviously misquoted. My original quote went something like this:

OMG can you believe 1 of the olsen twins is anorexic?!? i must help her. in grad school, i will learn how to teach anorexic girls to love their bodies — and maybe even lizzie mcguire too!! what if she has an eating disorder??? omg. no lizzie! you’re beautiful! anyway, i’m going to go to grad school and it will be just like on tv. like on grey’s anatomy, how they are doctors? they had to go to grad school too! and maybe i’ll marry a neurosurgeon. sigh…

I’m calling on anyone with a blog who reads this to participate in Flashback Friday! It doesn’t have to be a journal, old pictures would be pretty funny too.

Poor Y. An inevitable side effect of being a med student is that they start to imagine they have the symptoms of each disease they study. Usually after a few days, they realize their chronic fatigue is probably a result of excessive studying not cancer, and they can move on.

Well this phenomenon finally happened to Y. Sort of. He experienced a symptom, we blew it off, he started studying psychiatry, and now his study tools are urging him to get help.

See, after Y revealed his conversation with The Situation and we all had a good laugh about it, he texted me about another conversation with a celebrity. I’m guessing they, too, discussed their plans for GTL :

Just had a conversation with King George III

Or not.

A few hours later, Y showed me this screencap of part of a practice Boards question. Hint: the answer was schizophrenia.

Edited to add: Y just informed me he was wrong; the answer was that the guy was on LSD. So not only is excessive studying making him crazy, he’s not even getting the answers right.

Well, I think my blog is starting to act like me. It can’t decide what genre of blog it wants to belong to: Healthy eating, where the food I consume daily gets listed in hopes of inspiring others to eat like me? Sounds kind of boring, but you should see the free samples Carrots n Cake gets 😉 Fashion, where I take pictures of my outfits and list what stores they came from? It may seem shallow, but some of my favorite blogs like Kendi Everyday and The Chloe Conspiracy get it right. Cooking? Where I document the recipes I make so you can, too? Sure, except a) I’m a terrible cook, and b) When I do cook or bake, I get most of my recipes from Annie’s Eats or Homemade by Holman, so you might as well just read their blogs.

Keeping up with the number of blogs I subscribe to is like a second job; I read blogs that review books, in anticipation that someday I’ll read The Diary of Anne Frank and can not feel guilty about reading for pleasure. I read the aforementioned (and then some) cooking and fashion blogs. I even read blogs on organizing in the hopes they will make me organized. I read articles that are linked to from the handful of public health blogs I read. And I read Perez Hilton because, well, I’m addicted. My name is Daci, and I’m a blogaholic.

I guess I feel like I my little blog has to keep up with the ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY THREE blogs (on 10 different topics) that I subscribe to. A random sampling from my iPhoto “possible pictures for blog” folder can attest to that.

Pictures taken in case my blog decides to be a cooking blog:

Or a house blog:

Or a fashion blog:

But when it comes down to it, I think my favorite blogs are the ones where totally normal people manage to keep me entertained by sharing their completely normal lives. And since I don’t really excel at anything (except maybe owning a cute dog), well, that’s really my only option.

All this to say that I hope my little blog audience won’t judge the randomness and ADD, because it’s not going away. Have I mentioned I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up? More on that later.